Guns and Privacy, Woo!

In the Trayvon Martin shooting case, Zimmerman’s lawyer wants to subpoena the medical records, twitter account and facebook account of the woman Martin spoke to on the phone before he was shot, to ‘investigate her.’ They have the record of the call, the audio – but it seems they want to know how many secret gangleaders she’s retweeted, or how many revolutionaries she’s friended on facebook.

There’s no real comment or message here. A comment only on the American Justice system. The sticking point is that Zimmerman’s lawyer has tried to obtain her medical records before, to be stymied by the fact that she doesn’t have any.

I don’t mean to contribute to the voices trying Zimmerman, mind you. It’s a possibility that his version of events is true (though I feel it unlikely). It bothers me more that they want to obtain the facebook and twitter records of a witness – to what end? What possible use could that information be put beyond finding a way to smear?

One final interesting thing, though: Zimmerman has chosen to not select the Stand Your Ground defence and will instead simply claim self defense. Remembering that he pursued Martin down an alleyway, and instigated all involvement with Martin, I wonder if it will still be considered an acceptable escalation to draw a gun when Martin beat him up (for chasing him down an alleyway and threatening him).

2 Comments

  1. It seems a bit light even in the presence of the most recent scandal (http://www.nj.com/news/index.ssf/2013/02/lapd_cop_dorner_manhunt_ends_w.html) with profiling and abuse of power, no? I mean I’m starting to wonder just how safe people are under the watch of the Police if things like this continue to happen.

    A badge seems to be a way to use a gun to get what you want to happen to happen, and if you really feel threatened why should your first response to that be ‘please, shoot it as many times a possible.’

    Again, it’s highly possible that put in the same situation I would react the same way, but I’m also not in charge of public safety or keeping the peace or anything of that level of importance, so it really doesn’t matter what I’d do in that situation at this point.

    Can Ryker be my personal cop? Can we make him real?

    1. Science will get right on that.

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